Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Tools to Revive your Planning Strategy 

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

With this final post in our series on how to adjust and renew your approach to strategic planning in the wake of COVID-19, we’re discussing what tools you can utilize to support your efforts. If you missed the first two posts, click here to learn how to effectively use 2020 data, and here for suggestions on how to refocus priorities upended by COVID-19.

If you’re at the point of revisiting your 2021 strategy, or taking steps to set the course for what strategy should look like post-COVID, then the tools shared in this post will help you along the way.

How to Refocus Priorities Upended by COVID-19

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

In our first edition of this blog series, Evaluating 2020 Data—Is It Useful or Not? we discussed how to approach and make sense of 2020 data and use it for strategic planning. In this post, we’ll build upon that idea and consider how strategic planners can adjust and refocus their priorities after a disruption of such magnitude as COVID-19.

How can strategic planners start again? By moving forward in the face of many unknowns and building a new strategy based on a year of data irregularities. The insights shared here will hopefully provide a starting point to do so.

Does your hospital have a good strategic planning process in place? How frequently is the plan updated and does it impact your day-to-day work and growth planning? Take this short quiz and find out how your team is doing with strategic planning!

With this quiz, you'll receive:

• Immediate feedback as to how good your team is at strategic planning
• Tips and best practices for improving your strategic planning process
• Insights about the value of strategic planning to meet growth, quality, service, and physician relations goals

Early Data Shows the Rapid Shift in How Patients are Receiving Care

By Dave Sellers, Beth Duke, and Lee Ann Lambdin

In a recent blog post on planning for the future of telehealth, we shared tips for how to shift to a more aggressive virtual care strategy. We discussed ways growth planners can embrace telehealth and be better prepared for the future. We also talked about the importance of data while growth planning and how All-Payer Claims Data (APCD) provides unique insights that can inform hospitals and health systems as they prepare to respond to the growth of telemedicine.

We won’t have complete data insights until July as to the full impact of COVID-19 and the resulting rapid adoption of virtual care. The data we do have shows the drastic impact of the virus and the resulting stay-at-home mandates. By tracking the “Telehealth” care setting, we see a momentous spike in virtual care in March of 2020. While the transition to virtual care began to take effect in 2018, it clearly jumped in March of 2020 due to virus concerns. Take a look at claims and encounter data below to see the spike in virtual visits.

Tips for Shifting to a More Aggressive Virtual Care Growth Strategy

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Hospitals and caregivers across the country have pivoted to virtual care in response to COVID-19. It's opened the door for telehealth growth in ways we've never seen before. We’ve witnessed a rapid shift from a previously deliberate adoption path to a record pace of uptake. 

“Telehealth is bridging the gap between people, physicians, and health systems, enabling everyone, especially symptomatic patients, to stay at home and communicate with physicians through virtual channels, helping to reduce the spread of the virus to mass populations and the medical staff on the frontlines,” said Dedi Gilad, CEO, and co-founder of Tyto Care, a telehealth technology company, in this Healthcare IT News article. 

It's likely that this adoption to virtual care is here to stay, as patients will expect it to continue to be an option for care delivery in the future. So, how can hospital planners prepare for a change in strategy in light of our collective embrace of virtual technologies?

Become Your Own Best Advocate with Trackable, Data-Based Reporting

By Jennifer Keller

As with any area in business, marketers and strategic planners must be able to prove the value of their work to leadership. Yet with their reputation as a cost center, these teams feel more pressure to demonstrate positive financial impact. Essentially, marketers and planners must be adept at marketing their own achievements if they want to gain approval for new initiatives and see their budgets grow year over year. This is particularly true in healthcare, where budgets are tightening and facing closer scrutiny.

In this post, we’ll discuss tools and strategies that healthcare marketers and planners can employ to show they are valuable contributors to growth. We’ll also cover some real-world examples of teams facing common challenges finding success, proving their worth, and driving growth. Let’s dig into two key ways to make your team indispensable.

Identify How Stratasan’s Software Can Most Effectively Meet Your Needs

Is your team equipped with the right tools to analyze data and execute your strategic plan? Do you have access to the expertise you need when looking to identify growth opportunities? Take this short quiz and identify which tools and services can improve your team alignment and promote strategic thinking.

With this quiz you'll receive:

• Immediate feedback about which of Stratasan's software and services are the right fit for your needs
• Answers about where to turn for improved data intelligence
• Insights about how to more effectively align your team and see growth results

Overcome Market Share Myths and Kickstart Growth

By Lee Ann Lambdin

It is true that patients will go to the hospital closest to them IF all other factors are equal.  But the reality is — all other factors are typically not equal. Here’s what we’ve found to be true when it comes to driving hospital volume:

By Tony Camarata

Has this ever happened to you? You walk into a strategy meeting with your strategic plan, ready to plan for the future, but walk out with a long list of to-dos instead? The meeting that was supposed to be used to chart your future growth strategy is spent asking and attempting to answer questions about past performance. Your organization’s key stakeholders need to know more insight into certain figures and also have requested intelligence that wasn’t prepared in advance, but they are not the right audience to jump into Excel pivot tables.

Storyboards will eliminate this problem with live meeting facilitations.

Launch Pathway is a data visualization tool that lives on top of state data. The Storyboards feature enables you to take snapshots of market share, service lines, payor mix, and maps of your facility and add them to presentation-ready decks within minutes, all within the application.

Maintain a Growth Mindset in the Face of Tightening Margins and Shrinking Departments

By Lee Ann Lambdin

As healthcare margins continue to tighten and consolidation remains a reality for many small hospitals, numerous marketing professionals are feeling the need to validate their impact by developing marketing strategies based on reliable, data-based intelligence. The pressure is on to stretch marketing dollars as far as possible, and it’s important for marketing outreach to be focused and data-based. 

Marketers and strategic planners alike are facing a new reality that requires them to do more with less. Many who have marketing in their title are also responsible for planning and strategy as well, and it’s apparent that this phenomenon is due to one of two things:

• Either there was never a planning position or strategy has increasingly become a more important function for the hospital or health system so this job was given to the department that made the most sense: marketing.
• Or, the planning position was eliminated over time and the function was consolidated with the marketing function.